 So for more on a very well-documented and a personal account of World War One and early naval aviation, I give you Jeffrey Versano. Just out of curiosity, a show of hands, how many flyers or former service people in the audience? Okay, so I think you'll recognize a lot of the terminology. David Ingalls is, as was described here, a very lucky fellow. From the time he was born until the dime he died, he led an extraordinary life. He was a member of one of the most prominent families in Ohio. He was more than just sort of related to the Tafts. President Taft was his uncle. Later in his life, he was the campaign manager for Senator Bob Taft from Ohio when he ran against Dwight Eisenhower in the Republican primaries. In between, he served both in this First World War. He was one of the first undersecretaries of the Navy for aeronautics during the presidency of Herbert Hoover, who he adored, both Hoover and Mrs. Hoover, and then he came back in the Second World War and served in a variety of staff positions in the Pacific and ultimately retired as a rear admiral. At that point, he was still only in his mid-40s, so he was a busy, busy fellow. In terms of the origins of this book, you know, I think anybody that puts one of these things together, there's a story to it. And this one was probably about 50 years in its incubation. It probably goes back to when I was a kid and watched the planes take off and land at Mitchell Field on Long Island. And then that evolved into a more academic interest in the subject. And as a teenager, I went out and interviewed World War I fliers. I noticed that one of the scheduled guests today is Charles Biddle. Are you here at this point? I interviewed his grandfather, who was a World War I ace almost 45 years ago. Eventually, I met some of the people that were involved with the Yale unit. One thing led to another, and this book was the result. So let me tell you about David Engel's story because his story is really the story of early naval aviation. David went to St. Paul's as a high school student in the early teens. He was a remarkable schoolboy athlete. And this is going to play an important part in his success as a flier. He had remarkable strength, endurance, agility, hand-eye coordination, sense of balance, and so forth. From there, having earned a reputation as a hockey player, he went on to Yale in the fall of 1916, where he met this fellow, Truby Davison. Truby Davison's father is Henry Pomeroy Davison, who is managing partner at J.P. Morgan, who is also going to be the head of the wartime committee of the Red Cross for the United States. And Truby, as part of the preparedness movement, which was sweeping the Eastern colleges, had gone to Paris in the summer of 1915 to drive an ambulance, taking wounded soldiers from the train stations to the hospitals in Paris. But the more he did that, he looked around and there were these planes flying overhead and he met a number of fliers and he said, that's what I'd really like to do. So he went home and he spoke to his father and said, Dad, do you think you can maybe underwrite this? And the father said, sure, and if I can't, I will all ask my friends, the Lovets and the Haramans and so forth, and the Rockefellers, there's one of them in the group as well. And in 1916, in the summer, a small group of young men got together and began flight training. And their decision was they wanted to be naval fliers and they were going to form a coastal patrol squadron. In 1916, the fall of 1916, David Engels arrives at Yale. He meets Truby. He meets Truby's younger brother, Harry. He is invited to join the group. He does. During that winter, the United States and Germany drift closer towards war and in March, just before the United States declared war in Germany, the Yale unit, now about 24, 25, 26 young men, marches down to New London and Connecticut where they enlist in the Navy as a seaman sixth class. I mean, they are at the very bottom and they are sent to Palm Beach. Palm Beach is where there is a flying school run by Rodney Wanamaker of the Wanamaker Philadelphia Department Store and the Navy assigns one of their pioneer fliers, a fellow by the name of Eddie McDonald, to take charge of this group of college boys. And from the end of March until June of 1917, they begin their flight instruction. Among the members of the group, this first Yale group, is this fellow, Di Gates, a football player. He becomes a base commander during the war and during the Second World War, he will become the Navy's top civilian aeronautical civilian manager. He is the undersecretary of the Navy for aeronautics during the war. This is where they are staying at the Salter Hotel. It is no longer there. Actually, this represented quite a come down because at first they were staying at the breakers in Palm Beach. But it wasn't really conveniently located to the flying operation, so they moved here. And this is the entire group taken in Florida, photograph, probably in May of 1917. And by this time, there are close to 30 of them and you can see some of the aircraft behind. They are launched via ramps that take them from the land down into basically a Lake Worth on these dollies or cradles. There is Eddie McDonald on the right. He was hell on wheels. He really was. He was energetic. He was funny. He happened to have a Medal of Honor that he could wear around his neck when he wanted to impress people. He had gotten that for courage under fire at Veracruz in 1914. He is the first Navy flyer to have one of those. Ground school did not exist as we are familiar with it today. In fact, the Navy at this point had a very small training facility at Pensacola. It was not at all what it grew into very quickly and they had not yet established the ground school at MIT, which became again a very large, very structured, very academic type operation. So instead, these early groups, almost all of whom were college volunteers, basically picked it up by the seat of their pants. McDonald would give lectures. They would play with engines. They would work at repairing their planes. McDonald in a 1960 interview talked about how they used to hide behind various columns and structs and supports and boxes and try to take a nap when he was giving his lectures. But apparently they learned enough because all of them soloed while they were down in Florida and became many of them very proficient and many of them went on to become instructors, which was again the way it worked. The first generation of flyers was used to train the next generation and those that followed. Here was the machine that got them into the air. This is the Curtis F. Boat. It's a single-engine pusher flying boat. You have a pilot and instructor seated side by side in the cockpit in the forward part of the airplane. Every one of these fellows who left a written record of their early flights, they were just enthralled. Anybody who's ever been up in a small open cockpit single-engine plane probably knows exactly what they were talking about. And of course they're from a generation that was not rather jaded about climbing aboard a 747 and jetting off to Paris. They had never done anything like this before and they were ecstatic. Not terribly military looking. This is Morning Muster. They're kind of mixed working clothes, mixed haircuts, mixed posture and so forth. As I say, they were in the Navy but it was definitely not done in the regiment's way that was carried out at a Navy base. This was definitely a pickup operation. Now, as it got warmer in Florida, more and more heat is baking up, rising up off the land, off the water. The air becomes more unstable. These aircraft are not terribly stable. They will fall off. They'll side-slip. They'll fall off into a spin. These guys are not very experienced. And so the decision was made to move the base up to Huntington, Long Island. And this is a photograph taken of the training operation in Huntington, New York. The land you see on the top horizon there, if you just jumped over that, you would be in Long Island Sound. So if you're familiar with that at all. Here we have a number of F-boats and at the, all the way on the far right is an R-6. Curtis R-6, which is a, I guess, an advanced trainer. It's also used in the early days for some offshore patrol. This is the first Navy plane, by the way, to be looped. Marine flyer named Kaki Evans was down in Pensacola in 1916 and was flying one of these things and fell off into a spin. And everybody figured he was dead. And he actually figured out how to get out of that spin. For which he was eventually awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal or Cross in the 1930s. Sort of retroactively for the act of figuring out how to get out of the spin. He said, well, I've done it once, I have to do it again. So he goes up to 3,500 feet. Boom, does it again. Does it again. Then he says, well, they say you can't loop one of these things because of those big floats underneath. And he takes it up and for the first time he was able to loop one of these aircraft. Here they are again. They've been in the Navy now for, let's see, March, April, May, June, about four months. So at least they can line up straight. Their toes are pretty much on the mark. But otherwise they are still a pretty bedrag of looking group. Here they are launching one of those R6s. And this is done, this is muscle power. That's all there is to it. The plane is on a wheeled cradle. And just like you would launch a boat on a ship railroad, it's the same operation, down into the water until it floats. And then you bring it back in, you position it on the cradle and you pull it up out of the water. And this was done not only for small boats, but like this, for small aircraft. But for aircraft as large as the behemoth patrol boats at the end of the war, which would be launched with a loaded weight of about 10,000 pounds. So not surprisingly, the crews that launched them were known as the beach mules. In late July and early August, a team of Navy officers came up to New York and the young Yale Flyers took their flight tests to gain their flying certificates, to be declared naval aviators, and to qualify for their commissions as ensigns. All of them did except Truby Davison, who was the founder of the group. He crashed his plane, broke his back, and was basically on injured reserve, if you will, for the rest of the war and actually suffered from that for the rest of his life. However, in the 1960s, on the 50th anniversary of the forming of a Yale unit, there was a reunion hell and the Navy awarded him his honorary gold wings. David Engels qualified and then they sent everyone home for a few weeks on leave. Here he is, the steps of the family home overlooking Lake Erie in just that side of Cleveland. Everybody, of course, wanted to be sent overseas. Most of them in the beginning were not. They needed them as instructors and so they were puzzled out to one place or another. But he was one of a handful, about half a dozen, that was sent immediately overseas. He traveled on the St. Paul, which at that point was pretty much a rust bucket. I mean, if you think about this, we are 75 years after the Titanic. Well, if you know of Mauritania and Aquitania and all those giant canary liners, and here we have the St. Paul from the 1880s. And when he first saw this, he remarked somewhat facetiously that he thought this was the launch to take them out to. These ships had to obviously pass through submarine infested waters. They all carried Navy gun crews. Navy weapons were installed on the ships and there were small gun crews, usually three or four officers and about 25 or 30 men to handle three or four weapons. And as they would travel across, they would do their practice shooting and everything looked like a submarine, a box floating in the water, a porpoise, any sort of white cap in the right light situation. Luckily for Ingalls and everyone on the ship, they never did come anywhere close to a submarine. And in October of that year, he landed in Liverpool. This is where, if you were going to England, this is where you were sent. You would enter either through the northern or southern entrance to the Irish Sea and on into Liverpool. He lands in Liverpool. And, of course, immediately has to have a walking stick. He talks about this in his diary. Everybody either had a walking stick or a slugger stick. I don't know those things you put under your arm. So far as I can tell, he never actually used this thing, but he wanted to buy it and he wanted to be photographed with it. From there, he went down to London. Now, the mention was made that he comes from rather affluent circumstances. His father and his grandfather on his father's side are in the railroad and banking business. On his mother's side, you have the tafts and that money comes originally from the iron industry, the steel industry in Ohio. So there is lots of money here and he is not going to be staying at the YMCA. So he stays at the Savoy. He stays at Claridge's. He stays at all of the largest hotels in London. He visits the theater over and over and over again. This is Chuchin Chao, which was a review with an oriental theme that ran for, I think, something like 1,500 appearances, which was an extraordinary thing for that period of time. Good restaurants, but eventually he has to get to work. And so he's sent to Paris where, of course, he stays at more delightful hotels, goes to more extravagant restaurants, the Café de Paris and so on and so forth. He reports to this place. This is the only photograph of this I've ever seen. This is Navy Headquarters in Paris at the Hotel Yena. You can actually, probably not from here, but up there it says United States Navy. And this was where naval aviation was headquartered in Europe during World War II in this facility. This building is still here. I mean, all of these buildings in downtown Paris are still here, but this one is still here in great shape. He reports to this fellow, Hutch Kohn. Hutch Kohn is one of the Navy's leading engineers. In fact, as a commander, he had been bumped up to head the Department of Steam Engineering, which carried with it at least the temporary rank of Admiral. An early supporter of aviation didn't fly, but became a very, very strong advocate of building up aviation forces in Europe during the war. Our friend, young Mr. Ingalls, went to headquarters, got his orders, and was sent down to a place called Mushik. Mushik is located in southwestern France on the Bay of Biscay. There are a series of lakes just inland behind the dunes near the city of Bordeaux. One of them is Hortaine, which is a French base. You have Mushik, which was turned into an American training station. You have Cazaux, which is another French station where gunnery was taught, and a lot of the early army flyers were sent there for gunnery training. This is the American station at Mushik, and here was time to learn another type of aircraft. This is the FBA, Franco-British Aviation Company. And again, it is a flying boat, a pusher, and it is equipped with a rotary engine. A rotary engine, if you're not familiar with them, is one of the oddest contraptions ever invented. To spin the propeller, the entire engine spins. So the propeller is bolted to the crankcase, and the crankcase spins. Now, it works perfectly fine, and some of the most famous planes of the war use them, the Saploc-Camel, for example. But it has one inherent problem. By getting that heavy mass of metal spinning, you create an incredible amount of torque. And if you don't know what you're doing, it is very easy to have the plane literally whip over and go into a spin. The flyers here, the sort of neophytes, said, Okay, if you make a right-hand turn, you could go into a spin and get killed. We'll only make left-hand turns. So if we have to go right, we will go 270 degrees left. Now, obviously, you couldn't do that in a combat situation, but it seemed to work for some of them in the school situation. When David Ingalls was there, Moushik was being built, literally was being created. They had to cut down the forest, level the ground, and start putting up hangars and barracks and so on and so forth. So what he experienced, again, was not going to be what most of the flyers who followed him experienced. What he saw was the bare beginnings of a training station. There, he is reunited with Robert Lovett. Robert Lovett is another of the Yale unit. He had actually gone to Europe about two weeks ahead of Ingalls, three weeks ahead of Ingalls. He is the sort of wonder kid of naval aviation. He is given ever-increasingly complex problems to solve. He is remarkably, not only is he intelligent and hard-working, he is very organized. He's very insightful. Eventually, he is going to become the commander of the night bombing units that the United States Navy tries to establish during World War I, the first Navy strategic bombing initiative. After the war, he's going to come home. He's going to marry a brown of Brown Brothers Harriman. He's going to make quite a career for himself in investment banking. He's going to be called back to Washington by Secretary Stimson, and he is going to be the leading civilian official in charge of the strategic bombing campaign of World War II. He impresses George Marshall. George Marshall makes him Assistant Secretary of State, later Assistant Secretary of Defense, and he is the Secretary of Defense during the second half of the Korean War. He then retires when President Kennedy comes into office. He tells his officials, his transition team, you know, go get me Bob Lovett and give me any job he wants. He did not. He decided that he'd had enough career by that time. Anyway, Lovett is going to become, in essence, Ingalls' patron because they are college mates, because they are part of the Yale unit. He is going to select Ingalls for, again, increasingly responsible duties. This is what's left of Moushid today. The United States built about 30 stations in Europe during World War I. Two of them still have some substantial physical presence. This one and one a little further north, San Trojan. That was sort of Bachelor Officers' Quarters during the war. It was a small chateau and now is in quite decrepit conditions. And this is originally, this was the seawall and so the water came right up against there. That is the only monument in France to the Americans in the naval aviation that served over there. I'll tell a story anyway. My wife has heard it a million times, but I traveled over to France to look for these places. And I had the French teacher in school work out a series of phrases that I could use to make myself understood. And I came across a group of people who were sitting on the beach, not far from here. And in my, I thought, not bad French, introduced myself and said, I'm an American historian, I'm writing a book and I'm looking for this station and, you know, can you help me? They looked at me and they looked at me. And then one of them said, it would be a lot better if you said it in English. Another of Ingalls' closest associates in the war, in fact, his doppelganger, if you will, is Kenny McLeish. Kenny McLeish is the younger brother of the poet, librarian of Congress, Archibald McLeish. He is from Chicago. And the two of them basically trained together. They trained together and served together throughout the war. At the very end of the war, they switched jobs, each filling the other's position. Following his time in southern France, Ingalls, McLeish, and a third young flyer named Shorty Smith, Edward Shorty Smith are sent to Gosport, England, where there is a flying school having been developed by a British flyer named Robert Smith Barry. He invented or developed something called the Gosport tube. See this fellow with the tube sticking out of his mouth? This allows him to actually speak to the fellow behind because the noise in there made it impossible for the trainee and the instructor to communicate. These three Americans were sent here for advanced flight training because the Navy was establishing a patrol station at Dunkirk. Dunkirk was an exposed spot right on the northern border of France. Just before you got to Belgium, the front lines were 15 miles away. It was under fire continually from artillery, from over-air bombardment, from German vessels would come zipping down the coast in the middle of the night, blast away, and then go back north. The United States was going to establish a patrol base there to go after submarines that were coming out of a complex of German submarine bases in Belgium, at Bruges, Zabruga, and Ostend. These three Americans were going to be flight commanders. In other words, they were going to have control over a flight of four or five aircraft that were part of this mission. So they were sent to Gosport, and this is where they boarded in this basically artillery fort. It looks like a little castle with a molten such. This is part of a whole series of forts that were built to protect Gosport and Portsmouth during 1850s when there was a scare that war with France might be coming. There they were introduced to their first land plane. This is the Avro 504. There were thousands of these made. It was a very both gentle and responsive aircraft. It was an excellent aircraft to train with, and this was their first introduction to sort of a real airplane because the handling characteristics of this are entirely different than one of these flying boats. These flying boats, if you got up to 80 miles an hour, you were doing really, really well. This thing was, you know, up over 100, 105, 110, much more maneuverable. You could do all kinds of tricks with it, and of course, they immediately did because the Gosport system was you don't fly with an instructor after a while. We give you an airplane. Now just go play. Go play. Go practice. Do dog fights with each other, which they did. They would also, they loved to go racing along the ground at 25 or 30 feet above the ground. They would, you know, jump after herds of cows. They would head for a house and then pop up and over the house. They would just hell yes, driving people nuts in that area, but it did make you a much better flyer. Well, some it made much better flyers. This is a picture that Ingalls took while he was at Gosport. Now, there weren't that many aircraft there, you know, two dozen or so. In any given day, six, eight, ten, the sky is a big place. You would think, how is it possible that two planes could, these two, the actual story behind this is literally they were circling over the field and they ran into each other. Neither person was killed, luckily, but the planes were pretty much done in. Now, this is what he graduated to. This was probably, this was definitely Ingalls' favorite aircraft. This is the one that he made his reputation on. This is the famous Sopworth Camel. If any plane has an issue with torque and with a turning ability, this is it, almost the entire weight of that airplane is compressed into an area of not much more than about six feet in the nose of that plane. The engine, the armament, the cockpit, the fuel tank, it's all there. It's got a powerful rotary engine and the thing that made it so successful as a dog fighter is that literally it could turn like that, just turn like that. It was an inherently unstable aircraft. Now, an inherently unstable aircraft is also a dangerous aircraft and this was responsible for more training deaths than any other aircraft in the Allied armory. But it was a superb dog fighter, even at the end of the war when it was becoming obsolescent. A skilled pilot could still do an enormous amount of damage when one of these things and Ingalls loved it. Everything in that sort of schoolboy athlete, that hockey player that he had been at one time, he transferred to this machine. From Gosport, they went on to Turnberry. Some of you may have watched the tournament from Turnberry a couple of years ago. In fact, the Gunnery school that he attended is on the golf course where, was that the British Open? That the British Open was played on a couple of years ago. It had been a golf course in which it turned into a flight school and then it was turned back into a golf course. This is where they studied really the science of Gunnery and then they moved on to Air, which was also up in Scotland, also in the northwest of Scotland. The weather is horrendous. It is literally always raining. When we would travel there in March, February and March and you got the weather map of England, you would see rain, partial sun, a little of this, a little of this in southern England and then in northern England, across Scotland, it would always say gales. Gales and heavy rain and that's what they were flying in. It was quite dangerous and a number of people and a number of Americans were killed. This is a monument to the Americans killed there in 1918. Here is another one of England's photographs and here is a plane that came down. As a matter of fact, things got so bad that the pilot cadets went on strike. They said we're not going up in these aircraft anymore and the commander, rather than ordering them, got his flight instructors and the two of them, the group of them went up in the camels and put them through the most violent acrobatics at extremely low levels, you know, defying all the rules against safe flying and then brought the planes down and basically shamed them into getting back into the planes and going to Loft. From there it was on to Dunkirk. This is a little hand sketched map that was made by the Navy officer that visited there in 1917 and selected the site. The American base, well, this is the French base, flying base. Up that hangar there, that's the British and right around the curve here is the American station. It is one of the worst possible places to put a seaplane base. It is a working naval harbor. It is a working merchant ship harbor. It is narrow and constricted. There are buoys and barges and cranes everywhere. There is a crosswind blowing across the land because when you would go to some place like Gosport you have essentially a huge open field. You can take off or land in any direction. Here, because you're back on float planes you can only take off and land in one direction and if the wind is coming from the wrong direction what are you going to do? Stay up there until you run out of gas? No, you're going to come down. So there is a litany of planes literally running into ships, smashing into the seawall and so forth. Again, there are several American deaths at the American station there. This is the only panorama I've ever found of Dunkirk. See, this narrow strip of water here that's where they were landing and taking off from. This is what Ingalls was flying. This is the Hanrio Dupont. It's actually a land aircraft that was flown mostly by the Belgians and the Italians. It was turned into a float plane by putting those big floats on it. It was no match at all to what the Germans were flying in 1917 and 1918 which were much more aerodynamically proficient. In fact, by 1918 they're flying a single wing metal skin aircraft that can fly circles around these things. This is where Ingalls first got his baptism in combat flying patrols in this aircraft. And again, you can see the opposite shore of the canal there. Because the rise and fall of the tide in Dunkirk is so extreme, the planes were literally picked up and launched and retrieved with a crane which made for some fairly slow operations. The commander was Guy Foucherallier. There was a building named after him down at Pensacola. He was again one of the earliest of the naval flyers and died in a flying accident in 1922. Here is the enlisted crewman. This is the patrol plane that when looking for the submarines carried the bombs and Ingalls would fly essentially escort for these machines. Again, very rare photograph of the aircraft lined up ready to go out on a patrol at Dunkirk. The middle plane, now you can't see it but if you blow this thing up, up, up, up, up on the computer you can see the high forehead of Ken McLeish. So it's actually possible to identify the pilot of that middle aircraft. Killing time is a bomb proof because again you have German aircraft coming over on an almost nightly basis trying to unload this thing. You can actually, there's a little blur just above the roof and that's the baseball. And this is what they were trying to protect against. This is a raid that took place in April or May of 1918 and this is just one of about ten aircraft that were shredded by the explosion. This base was attacked at least 150 times up until July of 1918. The remarkable thing is not a single person was ever killed despite the amount of ordnance that was rained down on the base. March 1918, Germany unleashes its offensive to try and end the war. The RAF, as it comes into existence on the 1st of April desperately short of pilots. The United States has extra pilots and not enough planes and there's an arrangement made and those three McLeish, Ingalls and Smith are transferred from Dunkirk to 213 squadrons flying Sapleth chemicals. And off they go and they spend the month of April flying with the British. Here we have 213's camels lined up at the Berg airfield and here we see the three of them. There's Ingalls in the center with his pipe, always with his pipe, Kenny McLeish on the right and Shorty Smith for obvious reasons. On the left they're standing in front of the CO's hut at the British field. After service with the British he goes back to Dunkirk, spends another month at Dunkirk then heads on down to Paris. Check-ins headquarters has his portrait taken. He's in the middle. The fellow on the right is John Skinny Lawrence. That doesn't mean anything except after the war Ingalls' daughter is going to marry Lawrence's son and their children are going to attend my school where their names are on the boards for the captain of this team and the captain of that team. So the story kind of came all around in a circle. From Paris he was sent down to a place in central France, Clermont-France where the army was running a bombing school. The Navy was planning a strategic bombing campaign against those German submarine facilities. They said, trying to find a submarine during the day out in the North Sea is an absolute waste of time. You could find them at night because they have to be up on the surface at night to recharge the batteries and so forth but we can't find them at night. And who wants to land in Dunkirk Harbor at night? Instead, what we'll do is we will put together a force of heavy bombers and we will go and destroy the infrastructure. We will destroy the docks, we will destroy the sub-pens, we will blow up the repair facilities and so forth and if the submarines don't have any place to go home to then that's the end of the problem with the submarines there. And so the Navy puts together this program. They ask for volunteers. Well, Ingalls has been flying that Henri-El-Dupont now back and forth over the ocean, you know, getting bored out of his skull, said, I'll do it and so down he goes and he now learns to fly bombing aircraft. Where he meets up with this fellow, this is Randall Brown, this is his observer, gunner, bombardier, enlisted flyer. He's actually one of the people who was in that photo at Dunkirk of the enlisted men in front of the patrol plane and the two of them become an inseparable pair and they go through their training there. Here is in fact Brown's report card, if you will, but you know, they list his pilot as Ingalls. Ingalls can't stand being at the Army School. Now by this point he has been in combat, he has flown a half a dozen or more types of aircraft and he's got instructors who don't have anywhere near his experience, either technically or in real life and they're trying to tell him how to fly an airplane and he writes home to his parents complaining about all of that but nonetheless scores excellent marks and then as part of the program he and Brown and the other Americans are sent back to the British. The British are acting as their instructors. The Americans will fly British aircraft with a British unit for a certain number of raids, learn how to conduct them and then go back to the building American units. So this is what they've flown, the DH-9, the Davelin-9. This thing was supposed to be an improvement on the DH-4 which was actually a pretty good light bomber observation kind of aircraft, really very fast for its type. This was supposed to be an improvement, in fact it was a lot worse, so you get this thing loaded and you'd be doing if you really strained 75 miles an hour. Now imagine being moving along at 75 miles an hour, on top of you you have German fighters who just want to eat your lunch and down on the ground you have German flag crews that are blasting away and by the end of 1917, 1918 those crews are pretty darn good at bracketing an aircraft and so you would go out and more often than not that plane would come back with holes in it. But anyway, that's what they were flying. He flew several raids with the British. Here you see the arrangement, the gunner, the bombardier, sits right behind the pilot, so in fact they can talk to each other. That was the improvement in the airplane. This is what they were going for. This is not World War II, this is a World War I submarine pen. This is at Zebrugge, which is on the coast of Belgium. This is one of three German submarine facilities that were built there during the war. Here is Brugge, that is the German base. This is from an aerial reconnaissance photo. You can actually again, to get up close to that, you can pick out submarines and destroyers that are stationed there. This is the actual organization that Ingalls was going to be part of, the Northern Bombing Group, this strategic bombing initiative. The man in the center, the officer in the center with the mustache, that's Captain David Hangerhand. He was actually a destroyer captain and was also in charge of one of the American Q-ships during the war, one of those camouflage vessels. And then was given this job to run this bombing program, knew nothing about aviation, knew nothing about flying, but he did have, you know, substantial rank. And that enabled him to negotiate with sort of other parts of the Navy bureaucracy. Anyway, this is probably taken on almost this day, where they took their, in essence, their yearbook photo and everybody in it in a really good mood. This is where Ingalls was sent when he actually joined the Northern Bombing Group. This is St. Ingallert, this became a base where large bombers were located. Handle page 400s were here. That doesn't mean anything except to say that plane has a wingspan of about 100 and some odd feet. It's roughly the size in terms of dimensions. It's only a little smaller than a B-17. Now it's not nearly as heavy and it doesn't carry nearly the bomb load, but it could carry a ton of ordnance over a fairly long distance. So a major piece of weaponry. But Ingalls is bored again because there's a shortage of planes. So he starts begging Bob Lovett to send him back to 13 Squadron. He joins these guys, joins the British, flying his Sopwith Camel. There's the tight cockpit of it that he lived in. He was a big guy, I mean, he was over six feet and so he really had to sort of squeeze himself in this thing. There are some of his flight mates and it is with the British, the 13 Squadron, that he shoots down bits and parts and pieces of probably at least eight aircraft and balloons earning his place as the Navy's first ace. That's what he went shooting for, full of hydrogen. This is where he went after he was with the British. He became the flight officer there in charge of making sure that aircraft being sent to the Americans actually could fly. He's part of the crew that worked with him. He's an enlisted crew. The fellow standing there up above behind the propeller is in fact his bombardier from his duty during the summer of 1918. Here's their armistice photos. And he goes home in December of 1918 aboard the Mortania. He's at this point 19 years old. Here he's undersecretary for aeronautics. At this point he may have just hit 30. May have just hit 30. And here he doesn't look anywhere even close to that. He's out on the west coast for a fleet and aviation exercises. As a flyer, this is one of the reasons that Hoover chose him, he test flew all the aircraft that the Navy now. He was not obviously the factory test pilot, but he flew all the aircraft that the Navy purchased. Here he is on board Langley, I think. And here he is with the officers on board either the Lexington or the Saratoga. He's seated right in the center in his summer suit. At that point I think I'll cut off here. So now I'm bound to invite if there are any questions or observations or anything at all, feel free. Yes, sir. What circumstances led you to interview teenager World War I pilots? I am not sure. No, as I sort of rehearse my remarks, I think about it, what was it after my first year of college that I said I'm going to go out and do this. And I can't remember why. But I know I worked through the American Legion, I worked through some of the other veterans group, and tracked down a lot of people. I mean, starting with Eddie Rickenback, who was interviewed in his office in New York City. Eastern Airlines, yeah. Well, this is not Eastern Airlines at that point. Yeah. George Vaughn, who was an ace in the American and the British service. I traveled all around the northeast looking for these guys. And one of the ones that I mentioned was Charles Biddle, who became a group commander. And I interviewed him as a state down near Philadelphia. And that sort of, that was the bug there. And I then didn't work on it in graduate school or my master's thesis about this, published some articles. Through my wife met the daughter of the fiance of Kenny McLeish and got to see his World War I letters. And that led to a book, and that led me to the Naval History Center at that time, which eventually led to another book, which led to the Ingalls family. And I can't really explain it, but it's been a good ride. Yes, Charles J. Biddle. That's right. Yes, sir. As an item of interest, the Stockwood Camel was built by the Harkas-Sidley Company. Okay. Then in World War II, with his own money, the owner of Harkas-Sidley built the hurricane. And he stocked five, what, 700 of them? And without that 700 airplanes, they would have lost the Battle of Breton. Yeah, the hurricane's role, it's always been sort of the ugly sister kind of thing, and yet that was really the workhorse in the early days of the war, those hurricanes. Absolutely. Yes. Does your interest extend to these old Dreadle Trap aircraft? I'm sorry? Does your interest extend to the actual aircraft and do you get the aircraft? I have, I'm sort of fascinated by them. There are some people who are just phenomenal experts about the technology of those early aircraft. That is not me. But I've been up in a couple of these things. And as I say, when you're so used to being in a big commercial aircraft, to being something small, and you realize that it's constantly moving. It's doing this, and it's doing this, and it's never actually stable. Also, the lore of these things. The United States, during the war, developed this thing called Liberty Engine, which eventually became a 12-cylinder monster. And if you've ever heard one of these things go, especially without the muffler on it. You've got superchargers and everything on it. They're an amazing piece of machinery. You just close your eyes and you can see the planes flying over your head. That Liberty Engine was a popular one with the rum runners. With rum runners, they put them in boats. They put them in speedboats. Because there were so many thousands of surplus engines at the end of the war. I mean, they didn't really get the production cranked up until about the last four or five years of the war. And then the war was over. So what do you do with all these things? You sell them. All right. Well, thank you very much.